In radiosurgery or radiotherapy (collectively referred to as radiation treatment) very intense and precisely collimated doses of radiation are delivered to the target region (volume of tumorous tissue) in the body of a patient in order to treat or destroy lesions. Because the radiation dose amount and dose placement need to be sufficiently controlled for accurate patient treatment, the radiation therapy machine itself needs to be properly tuned at the outset (on the production floor), and then continuously monitored through periodic checks, such as, during initial installation or during routine usage of the machine by the customer, to ensure that the system is operating within appropriate and expected parameters and standards, such as, but not limited to, standards prescribed by a nationally recognized regulatory groups such as the American College of Radiology (ACR), the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), or the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM), for example.
Currently available radiation therapy machine tuning, calibration, and verification protocols, however, are slow, inaccurate, require external hardware, and/or rely on subjective human decisions.